Monthly Archives: August 2013

We’re constantly barraged with questions on the air—in radio and TV. You’ve heard them…

“Do you want a great deal on a new car?” (No, I want a crappy deal on an old car. That’s a really stupid question.)

“Got milk?” (No, got Gatorade. Oh, and those billboards you have up, the picture of some athlete with a milk mustache—tell him to wipe his mouth.)

“What do you think?” (I don’t care, and neither do you, really. You just want me to do your show for you.)

I’m convinced that questions are the death of radio, including those vapid little rhetorical questions, like ending a line with “Right?” or “Okay?” or “sound good to you?” If you need my response, you’re out of luck. I’m busy. I have a life. (George Carlin covered this best with “When will all the rhetorical questions end?”)

Questions don’t sound like you’re talking to me; they just sound like you’re pretending to talk to me.

So put everything in STATEMENT form. You’ll get a totally different kind of reaction – an emotional reaction – and the things you say will carry more weight, because making a Statement tells me what you think—which questions don’t do. Plus, using a Statement is a stronger “call to action,” so people respond to it differently. “Vote now” is much more emphatic than “won’t you vote now?”

Start today. It’s easy. Say “You can win Eric Clapton tickets” instead of “Do you want to win Eric Clapton tickets?” Say “I’d love to know what you think” or “feel free to weigh in with your thoughts” instead of “What do you think?”

Oh, and this “make Statements” philosophy should be applied to your recorded Imaging and Promos, too. The answer to ANY question in your Imaging is “No.”

Many air talents, even experienced ones, BROADcast. They talk too LOUD, sound really exaaaaaaaaaggerated, and can’t seem to relax into a more conversational delivery without losing energy or enthusiasm.

So here are two things to help you:

1. Remember that it’s not theater, where you need to make sure the back row can hear you. It’s more like a movie, where the camera might be just a few inches away. The mic is not a megaphone, it’s an I-Max screen where everything is magnified. Be subtle. Sounding “interested” or “animated” is a better thought than having “energy.”

2. See the microphone as the listener’s face. Whenever I worked in a female-targeted format, I just talked to my wife. In a male-targeted format, I just talked to my cousin Ricky, who was more like a brother to me. When you put a FACE to the microphone, it stops being an instrument and becomes a human being. You wouldn’t shout into someone’s ear from a foot away.

You want to talk TO the microphone, not through the microphone.

With a little practice and true commitment to get away from “announcing” or “presenting,” you’ll still be able to sound excited, enthusiastic, serious, thoughtful, intimate—all of the “crayons” in the box. You’ll automatically sound different from 95% of the blathering, loud-talking, blowhards who apparently think the listener is 20 feet away. And setting yourself apart from the rest of the herd is what careers are built on.

Often in coaching sessions, I hear something that laid a giant egg on the air justified by an air talent saying “Well, I just thought it was interesting.”

“Interesting” is okay, but remember that “interesting” is not the same as Relevant.

Relevance is the starting place. If it’s not relevant to the listener’s life, just being “interesting” won’t save it.

When your show Content matters to the listener, he or she tunes in again. When it’s just “interesting”—or even worse, just little odd stories or innocuous “fluff” Content—that’s a roll of the dice. Save the dice for Las Vegas. You don’t always need to make the listener gasp, or laugh. As a listener, the most important thing to me right this second might be just knowing if it’s going to rain, so I can keep my kids from getting pneumonia while they walk to school. Your doing “The ‘Um’ Game” or “Brain Teaser Trivia” just isn’t relevant to my life while I’m waiting to see if my kid needs to wear 14 yards of bubble wrap, his Darth Vader helmet, and rain boots. (It’s a long story. Suffice it to say that if you lose your raincoat, you get to start early on being seen as the Class Clown.)

Look at everything through the “Is this relevant?” lens. Throw out anything that’s not relevant to the listener’s life.

As radio continually beats the concept of “telling stories” to death, it’s important to remember that real people can’t talk.

That’s why—in music radio—we edit phone calls, so we can tighten them up, take out redundancy and sentences that don’t add anything, and remove irrelevant names of people we don’t know (or care about). Real people—people who are not trained professionals—aren’t likely to have the skill set to hold the listener’s attention as they tell a story. The average person is likely to go off “chasing rabbits” at any moment, which you know if you’ve edited very many calls. They mean well; they just don’t have the “chops” to keep it from bogging down.

And normal people usually aren’t great writers, either. They tend to stiffen up and use “print language” when they write, instead of the natural, everyday “street talk” that we want to use on the air. Keeping in mind that only people with cataracts want to be read to, when you do want to put someone’s email or Facebook posting on the air, please don’t just read it verbatim. The way it works best is for you to tell as much of the story as you can in your own words, just quoting an occasional line from them. That way, you can keep the story moving, leaving out repetition and unnecessary details that can easily make a genuinely heartfelt story come across like an A. A. meeting.

Now please don’t misinterpret this to mean that you shouldn’t put phone calls on the air, or share someone’s Facebook comment or email. Those ingredients are great, IF you make them airworthy.